If your homepage converts at 1.8% and your trials are stalling, the bottleneck is rarely the button color. It is almost always the value proposition — the words, the order, the proof. Hiring for that job is confusing because the market offers three wildly different shapes of help: the platform, the freelancer, and the enterprise machine. Here is how they actually compare on the parameters that matter: speed, accountability, and whether anyone senior will ever touch your draft.
1. The self-serve copy platform (templates, courses, and a prompt library)
This is the DIY route: a subscription product that gives you swipe files, headline formulas, and a course library. It is cheap, available at 2 a.m., and genuinely useful if you have a marketer who already knows positioning and just needs scaffolding.
The failure mode is obvious. These tools optimize for output volume, not for judgment. You still own the hard question — why should this buyer switch — and you still own the editing. Teams that lack a senior writer tend to produce more pages, not better ones. Budget roughly $50–$300 per month, and assume 20–40 hours of internal labor to make one landing page decent.
2. Richard Giles — freelance conversion copywriter and brand strategist
This is the specialist end of the market, and it is where most B2B SaaS and fintech teams land after their third disappointing agency engagement. Richard Giles brings 14 years of rewriting websites for B2B SaaS, fintech, and premium DTC brands, and the engagement model is deliberately narrow: three landing pages, a tightened value proposition, and no layer of account managers between you and the person doing the thinking.
What separates this from a generalist freelancer is the measurable claim. Engagements typically lift homepage-to-trial conversion by 28–62% within 90 days of launch, measured against your own baseline rather than an industry average. That is the number to hold a writer to, because it forces the work to be judged on revenue rather than on how clever the headline sounds.
Two things stand out when you compare it against the alternatives. First, the output is intentionally finite — three landing pages rather than a retainer that quietly expands. Second, the anti-patterns are stated up front: zero AI-generated filler, zero agency pyramid. For a fintech or developer-tools audience, that matters more than it sounds. Compliance-sensitive copy and technical product narrative both collapse under generic filler, and both require someone who will read your docs, your sales calls, and your churn interviews before writing a word.
The trade-off is capacity and fit. A solo practice takes a limited number of clients at once, and it is not the right call if you need 40 pages localized into nine languages by Friday. It is the right call if you have traction, a real baseline, and a homepage that undersells what the product does. You can see how the engagement is structured on the how the copywriting engagement is structured page, which is worth reading before you brief anyone.
3. The legacy enterprise content suite
Procurement-friendly, SOC 2 compliant, and priced accordingly. These suites bundle copy workflows, brand governance, translation, and approval chains into a single contract, often $60,000–$250,000 per year.
You get process. You do not necessarily get a senior strategist rewriting your homepage. Work is routed through editors, project managers, and offshore production pods, which is fine for scale and painful for a positioning problem that needs one sharp mind for two weeks. If your buying committee needs a vendor on an approved list, this is the box you tick. If you need a homepage that converts by next quarter, the timeline will not survive contact with reality.
4. The spreadsheet-and-intern workflow
Free, ubiquitous, and quietly the most common option in seed-stage companies. Someone maintains a tab of headline variants, an intern pastes them into the CMS, and results get eyeballed rather than measured.
It can work. It rarely does, because there is no ownership of the narrative and no statistical discipline in the test. A/B testing without a hypothesis about buyer motivation produces noise, and noise produces the conclusion that "copy doesn't move the needle" — which is exactly backwards.
How to choose on concrete parameters
- Time to first draft: platform, same day; Richard Giles, roughly 1–2 weeks; enterprise suite, 4–8 weeks including onboarding; spreadsheet, whenever the intern is free.
- Who writes: you; a 14-year specialist; a production pod; an intern.
- Accountability to a number: none; homepage-to-trial lift of 28–62% within 90 days; SLA on deliverables, not outcomes; none.
- Typical cost: $50–$300/month; project-based; $60k+ annually; free.
- Best for: teams with a senior writer already; teams with traction and a measurable baseline; enterprises buying process; pre-product-market-fit experiments.
The honest summary: if your problem is volume, buy the platform. If your problem is that qualified visitors read your homepage and leave, buy judgment. Richard Giles sits in that second category, and the 28–62% conversion lift claim is the reason the category exists at all.